Energy Through the Ages

Jay Walker, Tedmed curator and chairman, uses ancient books and artifacts to explain the history of energy, from human-powered contraptions to the atomic bomb.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

... check ... out the topic sported a fourteen years energy ... energy so ... no energy to starkly as coming from four places front of that water ... power ... you have human power you've got animal power and you've got five ... so let's start ... with let's go to the start of ... in the seventeen hundreds when we begin with ... two of those ... with this book here in order to see how ... Machines works ... starting in the fourteen hundreds ... you had human power ... those you on your back on your treadmills again ... right and ... the innovation animal power where animals are actually operating machines with two years ... these these are actual machines these bizarre actual missions in the Te Azzam here is the book of an actual machines you know we can look back and think ... they can have meant to seriously ... Vanessa they did ... humans powered all of this ... so then we go to water power of which the Romans of course discover ... but as we begin to the industrial revolution beginnings of the Korean does revolution you can see these enormous water wheels here on where they harness the power is his abode here of rivers to create the necessary energy in this case to do mine and we see a mining build wider wheels go back to the room for they do they go back to the Roman Empire but it's Europe in the West and fourteen dollars and fifty to sixty minutes and China ... starting around twelve hundred which is an extraordinary amount of water power to power their societies ... we can take another look here ... a fairly sophisticated looking one of our plans here ... and these are all water mills in you can see the beginning of spring during a police system here whether using one of our to transmit the power of the energy of the river ... to run machine ... so now we live in that ... of course ... mining is the big news for power ... and this is the first mining book in history this is the Greek alone ... this is published and printed in fifteen eighty ... so this is this can disappear fifteen eighty and just in case you wondered ... written here you can see ... both ... courses and then operating bellows ... and it's interesting that ... they need to get air into mine shafts is what begins the industrial revolution ... the very beginning in the dust revolution is to create engines so they can mine coal out of the grounded me on the fresh air down there we with sixty eight ... in the industrial emissions are what were needed for the very first time in Scotland ... was where they invent this of course you can see the course here ... the better one with a term Porsche power comes from and ... that's with the terms horsepower comes from comes from the trickle of early which talks about the number of courses in these ... you can see spectacular images all throughout the crippling fear ... of man and machines my name forces man all purposes is one of the spectacular illustrated books ... of the sixteenth century ... was mine chips ... so we talk about fire ... know when you think about fire ... and it ... brought a copy of the ball workout was page here ... so this ... is a basic question ... what's going on Amazon ... for most of human history ... the sun is a ball of fire which means it has to be burning ... we don't think of it that way of course today ... but this is a very early illustration of the surface of this on this illustration is done ... around seventeen hundred by a man named Valk ... and they have literally shown volcanoes source of fire on earth ... as well as the ... bubbling cauldron ... the question is is based on nothing nothing ... but actually this is based on imagination ... if they're imagining what the sun must be and it brings up a separate problem ... they had asked yourself the question when is this I'm gonna burn out ... because of all fires ... burn out because they're thinking of a wood fire ... and so speaking of burning out ... great ... this is the first problem you have when you bring buyers into cities to keep your home's order cook ... and so this is a Dutch volume of the first ... firefighting book ever published ... this is published in sixteen ninety ... see the Dutch ... now we're dealing with buyers in cities ... so for the very first time ... are suddenly faced with what happens when a fire breaks out to see made of wood or in the case of ... China and Japan made of paper and Anne Wood ... and these firefighting equipment this is an entire book about how to fight fires ... here is the entire house on fire ... done is to cut away and showing that in ages hear ... how these newfangled pumps are used to fight fires ... in cities ... of course ... this is a whole new technology the idea fire fighting technology ... and you can have a city in the modern sense of the word ... without figuring out how you're going to contain ... the energy source you bring into the city ... in order to cook and heat your home ... so this is ... a ... to know where to jump ahead to electricity ... most people think of electricity when they think of it the biggest of light bulbs ... oh where to go to talk about a different use of electricity when New York City built its subway system and monitor cities built in transportation systems ... they needed electricity to run the engines of the subways ... and this book here is the ... attention of the initial announcement book ... for the IRT subway system in New York with years of around nineteen hundred nineteen oh two and in this book here where does our global summer the picture so it's easier to say ... but your Tennessee literally ... these entire power plants that had to be built in one night taken from this the better of them are ... so this is the Dynamo design by Edison here ... in this thing is two stories tall in order to generate electricity literally ... and in fact just for the sub class for the subways ... this may look like Hoover Dam to some of you that this is a picture of him inside of the New York City Power subway station ... this is what runs the subways in New York City ... literally in of course now or in China and cities around the world where building the infrastructure for power ... and of course this is the exterior the building down and on still there it's still there this building with the smoke stacks and this is the cut away what it looks like so power is used in cities ... for transportation as much as it used for everything else ... so we go ahead on power ... we get to the modern age of nuclear power to ... announce the deal what kind of nuclear power to get this ... this this just published a few years ago the Armee de classified all of its photography about how to take pictures of atomic bombs ... and saw that my said ... this is a good book to have read it ... instead of a book on just showing all this atomic things this is the book taken ... somebody who really these guys talking about how the atomic bomb unit took pictures ... of this is the Micra seconds after the destination year ... of an atomic bomb this is the fire ball rolling ... in dough Micra seconds in this entire book including the stocks I like this book here cloudy overcast ... rights UN ... atomic bomb ... I had indicated to make that up the deficit ... these are your settings on your camera do director Kevin Camry is set into atomic bomb and you basically shoot a wedding ... cake ... Mr. the guys ... there watching the photographer's work I need to summon the unions that they are really you know those is Google's was deficit neutral the blessings of this is the book Eugenie to get you to get on Amazon had a photograph ... of it ... so we don't talk about nuclear energy actually ... we talk about the most powerful source of nuclear energy when Porsche right here what's an illustration of a picture of the stock ... and we now know today that the sun is a nuclear fireball its fusion energy ... and the sun is so big it's unimaginably large that the earth in this picture with the talent ... right in that little prominence there ... this solar prominence as five hundred thousand miles long ... in the earth the fitness center at how much power is the son of course now we know that the sun is almost all of the power of the year of weather directly in the form of some like ... it or indirectly the form of plants ... or animals or you name it in the oil of course is just captured someone ... so ... that is the story of energy were trying to figure out as a as a people how to get the sun's power ... to work for us to weather the weather we make it ourselves in fusion reactors ... difficult or whether we captured more efficient ... so we took it or from the beginning to see and hear ... about the power of imagination steadfast in my sense of what thinking we end with no this is really been about imagination though it showed specifics ... selected two things ... first I picked ... is Dr Seuss the deal ... would talk about imagination ... hard to beat doctors said that ... they are the zone American writer Dr Seuss is not alive anymore with the cap Manhattan of the things ... sold six hundred and fifty million books six and fifteen million copies in his book starting with the cabinet that ... and everyone of them were about imagination ... every one of them inspire children to imagine new things in this book itself is all the things you know the saying this is the first time this is come up in the last three days but here's the real source of innovation that here it is the source of innovation of course is imagination and much more ironic here is ... here's the current book of all the things you can think ... and it's in both Mandarin ... and English ... that said Dr Seuss is now not only inspiring Western readers and children ... but of course the inspiring ... Eastern as well ... I think one other artifacts to talk about the history of imagination one of the great copies of imagination courses IBM which caption so much imagination to work in science and engineering computers ... right ... and ... Thomas Watson ... is the be all talk about thinking ... he said look we need to think ... invite once in thinking he meant well thinking critically ... in human thinking matching simply be summed up all in one word which was on the signs of ... hundreds of thousands by the Amherst for dozens of years ... into and this I took this things on which is one of the regional very earliest signs that he made ... and I put a new word on the back ... which says ... the match ... this I think if he were alive today what some would have both words ... on a day ... this is been a fascinating tour you've taken so I'm sure all these people are gonna show up on your doorstep if it's too bad that it is to prepare for it ... but to see the rest of that but it's really been great thank you very badly I've enjoyed sharing the the the